Whether or not you agree with the whole thing, the writer makes a whole lot of good points, so it's worth a read
I only read first sentences, decided the font was too small and didn't read it.
Here you go
It’s time to have a real conversation about Game of Throne’s war on women.
For the past two seasons of GOT, I have written a recap post for each episode. Through character deaths, plot diversions, and a whole lot of upsetting storylines, I tried my best to find something to laugh about, so that, even when the show runners are treating the book series like toilet paper instead of a road map, we might have something to enjoy. But this week, I’m done laughing.
With last nights episode, the show runners have made two things abundantly clear:
Shock is valued above all else.
In Game of Thrones, women only exist to be hurt, tortured and raped.
And that’s why I’m willing to call it a war on women. This isn’t just an epidemic of sexual violence on TV (which, of course, is happening all across HBO), this is a calculated decision by the show runners to present women as exclusively victims. This is a blatant refusal to look at women past the traumatic situations that can happen to them.
Sansa Stark had an actual storyline in ASOIAF. The show runners insistence that there was no where else to go, while still allowing her on screen, is just bullshit. AFFC leaves Sansa at a high point of agency and hope - she’s stuck under the watchful eye of Littlefinger, but it’s clear that she’s starting to surpass him and for the first time in the books, she actually has some control over her situation. Sansa is not only coming into her own as a woman, but as a serious player of the game of thrones, and a threat to those who have crossed her in the past. Petyr offers her “Harry, the Eyrie, and Winterfell” and, at the end of the novel, Sansa is starting to have the opportunity to reach out and take it.
But that simply wasn’t the storyline that interested the show runners. A little happiness and a hint of something good to come just was not interesting. As Benioff said, it would have been “hard” to stay true to her storyline (perhaps because then you would have to actually write a scene with dialogue, instead of just cutting off a head or pushing a woman into a rape scene?) and that, “There was a subplot we loved from the books, but it used a character that’s not in the show.” [x]
So the Jeyne Poole and Ramsay storyline, which, if you ask me, is one of the most horrifying things in the ASOIAF series, was something that they loved and have been planning to include in the show for a long time. They went out of their way to make sure that they could include it in the show. They’ve been planning this out since season 2, probably counting down the days until Sophie turned of age. They were waiting for this.
Sansa’s original storyline wasn’t interesting, because nothing for them can be interesting unless it has shock value. That’s all the show is now. Game of Thrones has a reputation for shocking scenes (started by GRRM with Ned Stark’s death which, ironically, was done for actual narrative structure instead of scandal). And now that’s what the show has been reduced to - fast action sequences, rape and sexual violence, and occasionally a political scene where Cersei or Dany repeat the same tired monologue from season 3 and stare off into the distance. It’s just pure laziness. It’s not as if this storyline adds anything to Sansa’s character, or Theon, or Ramsay. There is literally no narrative point to this rape scene, other than to make waves and get people talking about the show.
The truth is, rape is the most interesting storyline that they think they can give a woman. They just couldn’t have spent that screen time on Arianne Martell claiming her birth right, or trying to crown Myrcella. Or on Asha Greyjoy claiming queenship over the Iron Islands, or of Arya Stark having wolf dreams, or of Sansa Stark garnering support in the Vale, or of Lady Stoneheart in the riverlands. Even if they wanted to transplant Sansa into another northerner’s storyline, they could have had her replace Alys Karstark, or even Alysane Mormont. But sexual violence was what they would give them ratings, so sexual violence is what we got.
And that’s been true for seasons. Screen time was given to Ros just so that she could be murdered horribly by Joffrey. Meera was subject to sexual assault, although there had never been the slightest hint of that in the book. Instead of a consensual sex scene between two loving partners, Jaime raped Cersei over the corpse of their dead son. Arianne Martell couldn’t be forced into a sexual violence narrative, so it was better to just cut her out completely. All female claims to power are just cut out unless they’re Dany, who literally hasn’t been allowed a bit of characterization or a new set of dialogue in two seasons.
The vast majority of episodes last season had at least one scene of rape or abuse. This season is following a similar pattern. In Game of Thrones, women only exist in situations where they can be tortured, raped or killed. Women are only worth the pain that men can cause them.
Last night, they raped an underage girl and, even in the midst of that trauma, the camera focused on Theon and how painful it was for him to watch it. Sansa is raped in her childhood home, in her parent’s bed, where the only good times of her life were spent. And even the horror of sexual violence in the only safe place that she has ever known isn’t the focus of the scene. Pain does not even belong to the woman who has to suffer it.
Perhaps the worst thing, for me at least, is that the show runners seem to not fully understand what they have done. They genuinely can’t grasp the idea of women as human beings, who deserve to be characterized on the show or, at the very least, put in varying situations. The whole point of ASOIAF is the ways that the unlikely grab power from the privileged, but there isn’t even a hint of that spirit here, it’s just scene after scene of those traditionally in power - white man after white man - telling jokes and raping girls.
But they don’t even seem to know what consent is. After Jaime raped Cersei last season, Alex Graves released a statement where he claimed that the scene was, despite what literally everyone saw on their TV screens, consensual. He said: “The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on.” [x] To this day, it shakes me to my fucking core that someone so ignorant, and so clearly hateful of women, was given the power to create something that I watched. He said, “she’s sort of cajoled into it, and it is consensual,” which should have been grounds to fire him on the spot.
And now, Brian Cogman is just following the same horrifying pattern. Last night, he said in a statement: “This is Game of Thrones. This isn’t a timid little girl walking into a wedding night with Joffrey. This is a hardened woman making a choice…It’s pretty intense and awful and the character will have to deal with it.”
How can you misunderstand consent so much, how can you dehumanize women so much, how can you convince yourself that women literally are objects, meant to be moved about to your liking? How were these men ever given a show to run? How wrapped in your own privilege do you have to be, how unconscious of other people, how disconnected from any humans outside of yourself do you have to be to fetishize rape this often and consistently and then say, with a straight face, that it isn’t rape at all?
It’s a disgrace, and even the actors know and have expressed that it’s a disgrace. Sophie has said: “She’s at the hands of another monster…When I got the script, I was shocked to my core. Because I was just like, is this really going to happen for her again?” [x] And she also said: “There’s this one scene i had to do that was super super traumatic and it was really horrible for everyone to be on set and watch.” [x] Alfie said: “It’s hard to watch…It can be tough to watch for some people, without a doubt.” [x] Iwan Rheon talked about how hard it was to film. When literally all of your actors are shocked and horrified by your choices, you’d think that the show runners might stop and think for a moment about what they’re doing.
So what’s left? What is left in the show that might be worth sticking around for? And what are they not willing to distort and change in the future, in the pursuit of ratings and fame? I’m terrified of what is coming for Maisie now that she has turned 18, or what they intend to do with Cersei’s walk at the end of this season. I can’t think of a single female character in the show who hasn’t faced some kind of sexual violence, from a comment in a tavern to a full rape scene. And now that they’ve taken that even a step further, and had an innocent child raped on screen, lingering so long on her screams to make sure the pain really hits home, and then called her rape a choice, I have to ask the question: what are they not willing to do to get people to talk about Game of Thrones?
